Cookies

This site uses 3rd party cookies from google for advertising and analytics which can be turned off from your browser.

In the Google Chrome browser, the Tools menu contains an option to Clear Browsing Data. You can use this option to delete cookies and other site and plug-in data, including data stored on your device by the Adobe Flash Player (commonly known as Flash cookies).

Another feature of Chrome is its incognito mode. You can browse in incognito mode when you don’t want your website visits or downloads to be recorded in your browsing and download histories. Any cookies created while in incognito mode are deleted after you close all incognito windows.

Other browser have similar options, just click on the help section of your browser to find out how.

Analytics Cookies

Google Analytics is Google’s free web analytics tool that mainly helps website owners to understand how their visitors engage with their website. It also sets cookies on the domain of the site you are visiting. It uses a set of cookies with names like ‘__utma’ and ‘__utmz’ to collect information anonymously and report website trends without identifying individual visitors.

Advertising Cookies

Google uses cookies, like the PREF cookie, to help personalize ads on Google properties, like Google Search, particularly when you aren’t signed in to a Google account. Google also use cookies for advertising they serve outside of Google. Their main advertising cookie on non-Google sites is called ‘id’ and it is stored in browsers under the domain doubleclick.net. Google use others with names such as _drt_, FLC, NID and exchange_uid.

Sometimes a cookie may be set on the domain of the site you are visiting. In the case of their DoubleClick product, a cookie called ‘__gads’ may be set on the domain of the site you are visiting.

Other Google properties, like YouTube, may also use the DoubleClick cookie to personalize ads.

Google also uses various conversion cookies to help advertisers determine how many times people who click on their ads end up purchasing their products. These cookies allow Google and the advertiser to tell that you clicked the ad and later visited the advertiser site. Conversion cookies are not used by Google for interest based ad targeting and persist for a limited time only. These cookies are generally set in the googleadservices.com domain, but may also be set in the google.com/ads domain. Conversion cookie data may also be used in combination with your Google account to link conversion events across different devices you use. Only anonymous conversion cookie data is shared with advertisers.

Some of their advertising products allow other companies to send their own cookies to your browser. For example, when you visit a page that uses DoubleClick, you may find that cookies are sent to your browser by Google and also by other parties. Each publisher and advertiser may work with various technology and service providers and each of these parties may set its own cookies, though each cookie can only be read by the domain that sets it. This means that several cookies may be sent to your browser by several companies in the time it takes a single web page to load. This is how most online advertising works.